Thursday, September 19, 2013

Deep Space

My employer, Epic, finished their User Group Meeting today, which means my cave paintings have finally gone public. For the last several months I worked on a team of eight people to paint authentic-feeling cave paintings in Deep Spacee. Deep Space is Epic's amazing, new, dug-into-the-ground 11,000 person auditorium. It is cave-themed.

This was by far the largest project I've ever worked on. In the past I've done murals with my high school art club, and done extensive solo work. I auditioned to paint in Deep Space thinking maybe I'd paint a normal sized wall, do something large but that would take only a day or two.

Instead I found myself in the construction site getting a tour, and being told that we had both stories of the outer wall of the auditorium - approximately 8 feet tall by 1400 feet total. 11,200 square feet minus spaces for doors and water fountains and such, so more like 5,600 square feet.

It was amazing. I had a great time and made some wonderful friends while working on the project. I am very pleased with and proud of my contributions.

So, without further ado, here are the cave paintings I did, some the group did, and my source photos.

To give you some context, here is what it looks like inside Deep Space:

This is an artist's rendering of what it will look like once the landscaping is installed:

Here we are the first night when we were playing with the paint. We were doing a group wall of cows, since the cow is sort of Epic's symbol. Everyone interpreted their own cave cow while men on lifts worked directly behind us installing ductwork and electrical wiring. Someone else did all the "cavey" background colors, we just had to paint on top of them:

When you work on an active construction site you get your very own extremely attractive hard hat and yellow vest. Don't pretend you aren't jealous.

Here are my cave cows with their little friends:

Then I decided to work off of this ancient cave painting on a wall approximately 13 feet by 8 feet:

Here is my version. I tried to be as faithful to the original as possible.

Next I contributed to our group buffalo drawing by chalking in the outlines and layout based on John Bigler's design and painted my own buffalo. I don't have photos of the whole wall, but here it is in progress:

Then I did this dark brown bird on the bird wall. I feel like he may have come out too tattoo-ish:

Here he is in context:

Next I did a drawing from Algeria of these giraffes and cattle. Source Image:

My version:

I did a set of deer from different sources. My reference images were:

My versions of the deer. I admit I gave the guy on the right a few extra antler prongs. I had to do it for Dr. Seuss:

And finally, my favorite, the big goofy rhinoceros. He is based on this Rhino from the Chauvet cave:

My version:

So there you have it. I hope you enjoyed seeing them as much as I enjoyed painting them. I will update with photos of the rest of the paintings done by the others on the team at a later date (when I'm not slumming on the laptop).